Book Review: Makau Mutua, Human Rights Standards: Hegemony, Law, and Politics
| Author | Alexander Agnello |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929917712149 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsInternational Relations |
620 Political Studies Review 15(4)
undermines Augustine’s pervasive doctrines of
love and humility, Sifton helpfully weaves in
biographical accounts of his grandfather, and
his influence on Martin Luther King Jr and
Barack Obama. Recalling Obama’s Nobel Prize
Speech, Sifton critiques any stark line devised
between violence and non-violence that does
not show their tension and intermixing; think
only of Gandhi’s satyagraha.
Such admittance raises further troubling
questions for a human rights lawyer, and for all
of us, wanting and seeking a more peaceful and
just world: how complicit and compromised
are we to the centres of power which often
allow, instigate or control both the means of
practising non-violence and the subsequent
reaction or accounting that non-violence
uncovers? What is the value of human rights
documentation, research and findings if it is
ultimately dependent on some acts of enforc-
ing, and so violence? Does it inevitably need or
contribute to the violence, or, at the least, rely
on the violence for a response? These are just
some of the sobering questions in this absorb-
ing, informative and deeply personal collection
of reflections on violence.
Peter Admirand
(Dublin City University)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716090
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Human Rights Standards: Hegemony, Law,
and Politics by Makau Mutua. New York: State
University of New York, 2016. 206pp., £57.25
(h/b), ISBN 9781438459394
Makau Mutua begins Human Rights Standards:
Hegemony, Law, and Politics by regarding the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR) as a ‘credible promise rather than a
holy text’. This message is the starting point
for addressing the deficits, exclusions and
incompleteness of this promise. Mutua can-
didly regards the crafting and implementation
of the UDHR as an ‘act of exclusion’ commit-
ted by Western states (p. 20).
Nevertheless, the document has been adopted
as a key part of international law and a source of
moral authority across the world. Mutua aims to
look beyond the UDHR’s sphere of influence to
question whether the document can live up to its
claim to universality and capture non-Western
expressions of human dignity, among other val-
ues. One such question is whether the UDHR, as
a secular undertaking, can connect with the
Islamic society’s interrelation between state and
religion (p. 179).
Mutua scrutinises human rights advocates
who regard rights as ‘“antibiotics” that any cul-
ture would be foolish to reject’ (p. 56). This sen-
timent has been voiced, but it can also be a tacit
feature of an advocate’s operations when she or
he exploits the human rights corpus as a tool to
legitimise a purely interventionist role. This
trend of exclusion also applies to entities such
as non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
which are defined as either needing norms or
capable of lobbying effectively for their imple-
mentation.
Human rights groups in the Global South
have difficulty setting international norms
because they are financially overextended, face
safety threats and are generally not included in
the highest levels of decision-making (p. 67).
Mutua believes that identifying and rectifying
the deficits that are responsible for this exclusion
from international governance, along with the
overall underdevelopment of the Global South,
will require an application of Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
Mutua’s general advice is not to regard
the UDHR as a holy grail. Academics have
an important role to play in separating the
noble aspirations of human rights from its
current normative framework. We should be
critical of motivations behind initiatives that
simply export Western values and fail to be
collaborative and attentive to other nations’
prerogatives (the right to development) in
norm-making. The Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) appears
to be a step in a better direction, as it embod-
ies rights (social and economic) and values
(solidarity and community) that are not cap-
tured by the UDHR.
Alexander Agnello
(McGill University)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917712149
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